Month: June 2019

A Tale of Two Cities (1935)

A Tale of Two Cities (1935)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, June 2019) Not being all that familiar with Charles Dickens’s novel beyond the celebrated opening lines, I got to enjoy A Tale of Two Cities first as a story and then as a film. As such, I had a better time than expected: the story takes twists and turns that may be unpredictable to modern audiences weaned on a clean three-act structure, and on more traditional notions of heroism. The dialogue here is remarkably good, and the actors do get substantial parts to play. As befits a mid-1930s prestige production, there are great costumes, lavish sets, and arresting set-pieces. The pivotal Prise de la Bastille sequence does feel as if it comes from another movie as it switches from costume drama to large-scale action-packed filmmaking—it’s even explicitly credited to another director! Still, it does set the stage for the film’s more sombre sequences with post-revolutionary kangaroo courts convicting the guilty and the innocents alike. Despite some hiccups in the plotting challenge of trying to fit a complex multi-year novel in barely two hours, I quite enjoyed the film—good work by the actors helps a lot in executing a good script. Ronald Colman is particularly good as the self-acknowledged drunk lawyer who becomes the hero of the story. One of my favourite character actresses of the era, Edna May Oliver, gets a few choice quips and even an action sequence late in the movie. The elegiac ending sequence, deftly handling tricky melodramatic material, does tie the film in a satisfying bow. A Tale of Two Cities works best as a double feature with the also-1935 version of David Copperfield for a double dose of 1930s Dickens featuring Oliver.

Le Marais [The Marsh] (2002)

Le Marais [The Marsh] (2002)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2019) A typical criticism of French-Canadian movies is that they often take place on a very literal, very realistic register: They’re often concerned with domestic drama in a contemporary setting, or in realistic depiction of French-Canadian history. Now here comes Le Marais to offer a counter-example: Set in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, it’s a semi-fable about a small village, a semi-accidental death and its coverup ensnaring two eccentric men living near the closest marsh. The film’s images are unusually impressionistic, set in fog and palpable humidity. The plot doesn’t stick to reality as we know it. Actors (and not the usual group that you can see over and over in Québec’s biggest box-office hits) speak in an unusual accent, cultivate eccentricities, and behave with the gravitas that their semi-poetic dialogue requires. Writer-director Kim Nguyen is clearly trying something different. The film may or may not be meant to be taken literally—there are levels of meaning and thematic resonances here … it’s not just a movie about characters living near a marsh. Alas, for all the freedom that the non-realistic approach implies, it’s also a movie that leaves cold: when the end comes, relatively abruptly, I was left with a shrug and no real intention to stay a moment longer in Le marais’s distinct reality.

Battle of Britain (1969)

Battle of Britain (1969)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, June 2019) I thought I’d seen most of the big ensemble WW2 movies out there, but I had missed at least one landmark: 1969’s Battle of Britain, a lavish recreation of pivotal WW2 events. Featuring a near-complete list of late-1960s British actors, the film feels almost as fresh fifty years after first appearing on-screen thanks to a big-budget colour treatment where the money is all visible on-screen. Presenting a few years of events in slightly more than two hours, director Guy Hamilton hits almost all of the high points from dogfights, character moments, a Nazi rally, the spectacular destruction of an airfield (with terrific pyro and stunt work) and London bombing reactions in between the requisite discussions between British higher-ups. It’s really a remarkable achievement and it does put even a familiar moment in British history in perspective. Its influence is crystal-clear on later movies such as Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. However, it’s interesting to note that its perspective on war is closer to an earlier generation, presenting a quasi-reverent take on a national point of pride—right as the mood of wartime movies would turn sour in reaction to Vietnam. Some of the special effects are a bit dodgy, but never mind—the aerial sequences are spectacular and the film is still a capable spectacle today. I’m ranking Battle of Britain an essential WW2 film.

Madame Curie (1943)

Madame Curie (1943)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, June 2019) The ever-compelling Greer Garson had a remarkable five-year run of Oscar nominations in the early 1940s, and the biographical drama Marie Curie was right in the middle of it, focusing on the scientist’s turn-of-the-century discovery of radium. As befits a 1940s Hollywood production tackling scientific subjects, the emphasis here is on melodramatic sentiments, beautiful romantic black-and-white cinematography and actors mouthing off grandiose statements about science, peering sagely in a long-distant future to extrapolate the meaning of their research. Some of it comes across as silly and overdone, but everything must be put in perspective, and by most standards (including, often, our own), Madame Curie is still quite an admirable movie—it doesn’t soft-pedal either Curie’s femininity (easy enough with Garson in the lead role), the heartwarming loving relationship with her husband (Walter Pidgeon, looking dashing with a sharp-chinned beard), the importance of her discoveries or the effort that goes into actual science. While it does allow itself quite a few moments of unabashed Hollywood romanticism, those more conventional passages work at making the characters likable in addition to illustrating their serious intellectual achievements. The scientific vulgarization is not bad (despite a few shortcuts) and the portrayal of a woman scientist is still remarkable either for 1900, 1943 or 2019. I quite liked it, and I remain surprised that at an age where STEM for girls is rightfully seen an unabashed good, Madame Curie isn’t better known or more widely seen.

Little Giants (1994)

Little Giants (1994)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2019) As an underdog kids’ sports movie, Little Giant is exactly what you’d imagine as an example of the genre. The plot threads are familiar and obvious, the details are well observed and the film is often more interesting in its execution than its overall structure. Much of the film’s success comes from two well-matched actors: Ed O’Neill as a hometown football hero (echoing his more famous turn in Married with Children) facing down a kid brother played by Rick Moranis. The plot details are unimportant, leading us anyway to an absurdly important climactic football game won by the expected underdog. Some material involving Shawna Waldron playing a tomboyish teenage girl is more interesting than expected. Otherwise, it’s a comedy firmly in the mould of mid-1990s material. Some of it hasn’t dated well—considering what we now know about concussions, the idea of a kid’s movie about football seems more irresponsible than ineluctably American. (But do I repeat myself?) You also must swallow an unhealthy amount of skepticism retardant in order to believe in the amount of plot cheats required to make it from beginning to end. Still, as those movies go, Little Giants plays rather easily. One note to francophone viewers: The Québec dub of the film is particularly annoying, adopting a dialect that almost touches upon Québec joual before reverting to the mid-Atlantic correctness we expect from American film dubbing.

Armed and Dangerous (1986)

Armed and Dangerous (1986)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, June 2019) As one of John Candy’s less-famous films in the middle of an extraordinarily productive decade, Armed and Dangerous often feels like mid-1980s comedy filmmaking at its laziest, with a workable premise battered through atonal development, fuzzy characterization, cheap plotting, and lazy writing. The premise does show some promise—as an ex-cop and a disbarred lawyer find themselves working as security guards, they come to discover a plot to embezzle union dues. Alas, the development of the premise feels off. I shouldn’t worry too much about the portrayal of a corrupt union, but I do—anti-union sentiment is symptomatic of 1980s Hollywood presumptions, and we now know where that path has led us. To be fair, Armed and Dangerous is dumb enough that it may not quite realize what it’s playing with, and does give equal credence to the idea of corrupt cops as well. The rest of the film isn’t much better—as the plot (already thin at 88 minutes) regularly stops to let Candy go on extended comic rants, it’s clear that the numerous screenwriters have no idea how to keep a consistent tone throughout the film: Candy’s character alone veers uncontrollably between incompetence, silliness and effectiveness in a way that suggests that Candy was allowed to run roughshod over what may have been a more coherent character. Other lazy plot shortcuts abound, including a final sequence with a truck driver blissfully unconcerned with the destruction of his rig—there’s a lot more comic mileage to be made out of this idea, but the film barely even tries. On and on it goes: Candy is up to his usual character, but the more interesting work is by Eugene Levy, turning in a character performance more interesting because it’s not quite part of his later persona. Meg Ryan looks cute, but that’s about it—anyone else could have done just as well. A welcome bit of vehicular mayhem does enliven the film’s last twenty minutes (albeit limited by the film’s average budget) but that’s not enough to make up for the rest of Armed and Dangerous.

Halloween (2018)

Halloween (2018)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, June 2019) You can take the opening sequence of this Halloween remake as a summary of its strengths and weaknesses in a nutshell—a sequence giving us suspense in broad daylight, maxing out the spooky stuff, but ultimately signifying nothing and ending in mid-air with nothing achieved. A lot of sound a fury signifying nothing—if you’re not the kind of person who enjoys slasher movies and would go as far as to say that this kind of film should be left in the dustbin of history, then this newest endless umpteenth version of Halloween is not going to change your mind. For all of director David Gordon Green’s skill in crafting suspense sequences that have a little bit more to offer, there is nothing here to make us rethink the staleness of the genre’s approach. The crazy-prepared shtick by Jamie Lee Curtis is fun but doesn’t lead anywhere new. The psychologist indulging in some of that murderous mayhem is merely a five-minute detour that other movies have explored at length. The transgenerational trauma is presented as new but was seen in H20 already. To be fair, this Halloween far better than the Rob Zombie movies that no one wants to acknowledge, better than H20 and better than the fourth-to-sixth ones. (Halloween III exists in another dimension, and I tend to consider Halloween II to be an extension of the first) Curtis is magnificent in a role that a lot of actresses her age would have killed for, Judy Greer is far better used in comedies (although she does get a good gotcha moment at the end), while Andi Matichak is undistinguishable as the granddaughter. Still, there isn’t much here to make us think any better about slashers in general—it feels as if all of this Halloween’s ideas are cribbed from previous instalments in the series itself, with only a patina of good execution to keep things afloat.

The Big Parade (1925)

The Big Parade (1925)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, June 2019) The history of anti-war movies is longer than is often acknowledged, and we can point to films such as 1925’s The Big Parade as an influential statement that would inspire many. Coming from the horrors of WW1, it takes the decision to depict war honestly, paving the way for more forceful statements such as All Quiet on the Western Front. It does have the drawbacks of many silent movies: At 151 minutes, even a skilled director such as King Vidor takes forever to make his points and advance the action. More than half the film happens before the soldiers even see combat, and those pre-combat scenes during which they romance a French farm girl are easily the most forgettable of the film. Still, The Big Parade doesn’t hold back its punches in its last hour, with a harrowing forest march in which rows of soldiers are picked off by hidden snipers, and then on to the more familiar scenes of trench warfare. None of the soldiers make it whole through the film. While the film is far too long and repetitive for modern audiences, it’s still a powerful statement, and an effective recreation of war sequences, barely seven years after the end of WW1. You can compare and contrast with other WW1 movies completed before WW2, including comedies such as Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms and Keaton’s Doughboys.

La nuit américaine [Day for Night] (1973)

La nuit américaine [Day for Night] (1973)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, June 2019) I am a very indulgent viewer for movies that talk about movies, so it was almost inevitable that I’d have a soft spot for La nuit américaine, a rather fun film describing the filming of a French melodrama. It does feature clever meta-textual stuff that will make more sense the more you know about movies. It’s written and directed by François Truffaut, who also turns in a suitably sympathetic performance as the in-movie writer-director. The usual happens—production problems, neurotic actors, cast/crew hanky-panky, and serious accidents (of them, fatal, happens offscreen and is played for mostly laughs as if the actor had disappeared abruptly from La nuit américaine itself). It’s also a look at early-1970s studio-based filmmaking, with Truffaut explicitly closing on a mournful note that movies should not go to the street and entirely abandon their own specialized filmmaking environment. Compared to other French New Wave movie, it’s surprisingly funny—although, by 1973, you can make an argument that the New Wave was becoming undistinguishable from the rest of the filmmaking ocean. It’s generally about the relationship that the cast and crew have with making movies—as one character says, “I’d leave a man for a movie, but I’d never leave a movie for a man”—no wonder Hollywood loved this film and gave it an Academy Award. (An interesting bit of trivia is that it was nominated for Oscars two years in a row: first winning the foreign film award for 1973, then nominated for three more Academy Awards for its 1974 American run.)  La nuit américaine may or may not have aged not-so-well—I suspect that while it remains charming and fun today, it’s not quite a fresh or new or revelatory as it must have seemed to an audience decades before lengthy making-of movies (sometimes more interesting than the movies they depict) became such a staple of DVDs and online promotional material.

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, June 2019) Considering that the 1942 Doolittle raid over Tokyo was itself mostly a propaganda operation, it does make sense that it would lead to a 1944 propaganda movie about it in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Spencer Tracy is the biggest name in the movie as Doolittle making a few speeches (usually telling his crew that it’s OK if they quit and, in an interesting scene, that they should if they’ll think of themselves as murderers to civilians working in military factories), but much of the film is focused on a small bomber crew as they undergo training, deployment, action and egress to safety. Despite the obvious propagandist value of the film, Dalton Trumbo’s script is a well-constructed journey with likable characters as they go from home to danger and back. It also soft-pedals demonization of the enemy, portraying it as a justifiable response to past slights rather than killing for killing’s sake. (That’s not quite the historical record, but compare that attitude with other 1940s war movies that delight in mass murder and you’ll see the difference.)  As a result, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo has aged better than many films of the era—it’s surprisingly entertaining even today, and some great Oscar-winning special effects do help it stay even more impressive with time.

Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars (2017)

Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars (2017)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On TV, June 2019) Don’t feel bad if you’re just learning that there’s a fifth Starship Troopers film called Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars—most people don’t even know that there was a second one, or that the second and third ones were low-budget live-action efforts before the fourth and fifth became photorealistic computer-animated movies. With such a messy pedigree, it’s kind of a surprise to find out that this fifth film brings back four of the characters and two of the actors (or at least their voices) from the first film, not to mention the same screenwriter. As a result, Traitor of Mars is an interesting follow-up—very much a follow-up to the fourth film in tone and execution, with links going back to the Verhoeven film through its satire of a militaristic society (“Would you like to know more?”) but also to the Heinlein novel in its uncompromising depiction of armoured-suit combat against the arachnid enemy. Much of the film is incredibly dumb, but at least it’s consistently dumb with the rest of the series so far—we’re not really supposed to believe in hordes of alien spiders taking over planets, or that military infantry would be the best solution to that problem, or people being so stupid as to blindly follow a military dictatorship. But those are the assumptions of the series, and Traitor of Mars does make the most out of them. Playing with science-fiction devices such as terraforming towers, this is a film solely dedicated to its action sequences, and accessorily to some kind of mandarins-eating-each-other political subplots making life more difficult for our fighting heroes. It’s actually fun to see all four lead characters of the first film back for more (even Dina Meyer voicing Dizzy Flores!) and the tone, despite the focus on action, is very similar to the original. What’s new since the fourth instalment, of course, if the photorealistic CGI—Traitor of Mars is similar to such efforts as Starship Troopers: Invasion, Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV and Resident Evil: Vendetta, all aiming to deliver as convincing a movie as it’s possible to do inside a computer. It falls short in presenting humans, but often succeeds in shots that don’t show human flesh—making it a perfect choice for exo-armour combat. I’m not going to argue that Traitor of Mars is any good a movie—it could go much farther in both the satire and the action, and at significantly less than 90 minutes it’s not trying to be anything much more than another instalment for the fans. Still, it’s not bad and can even present a few good sequences five movies (or three, depending on how you feel about movies 2 and 3) into the series.

The Sandlot (1993)

The Sandlot (1993)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On TV, June 2019) There are no perfect movies, but there can be archetypical movies—films so accurate in their intentions and execution that it’s hard to imagine them being any better than they are. After a belated first viewing, that’s how I feel about The Sandlot: If you were to make a movie about boomers reflecting on the early 1960s through a narrated coming-of-age comedy about baseball, you would probably end up remaking The Sandlot. The story isn’t that complicated, featuring an unathletic kid trying to make friends in his new neighbourhood and discovering a group of boys playing baseball in a nearby abandoned field, with a dangerous dog on the other side of the fence. It certainly helps that the film, at times, echoes other similar movies such as Stand by Me, A Christmas Carol and Field of Dreams: there’s a universality to its execution that finds an echo across a wide audience, focusing on the low stakes so important to early teenagers, and occasionally slipping into fantastical imagination as an impressionistic device. It works even for people with no particular interest in baseball. There are a handful of striking scenes (some of them still influential, as the trailer for Stranger Things season 3 shows), a feel-good ending, some clever character work and a nostalgic atmosphere that comes close to cloying without quite being stuck in it. After a bland beginning, I progressively got into it and was won over by the end. The Sandlot does exactly what it wants, and it does it as well as anyone could have done.

Eight Men Out (1988)

Eight Men Out (1988)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, June 2019) I’m not much of a baseball person, but even I found myself gradually interested in Eight Men Out’s depiction of the World Series-fixing scandal of 1919—a sordid little footnote in American sports history during which gamblers managed to convince a few White Sox players to deliberately lose games and be compensated by a share of the profits. Perhaps the most interesting thing in writer-director John Sayles’ film is the way even a fixing operation is fraught with complexity: It’s not enough to even convince the players (in this case, helped along by the baseball team owner’s legendary cheapness)—you have to prevent leaks, ensure that they’re paid, and fight against every player’s instinct to win. A bunch of name actors (including John Cusack, David Strathairn, Charlie Sheen and others) help keep Eight Men Out interesting even despite the absence of a satisfying climax: the film mirrors the regrettable real events that led to the lifelong expulsion of eight players from the baseball league—including Shoeless Joe Jackson—, the team owners asserting their control over players (a decades-old theme) and national disillusionment about the purity of baseball. Despite the usual warnings against learning history from Hollywood movies, Eight Men Out is a fascinating illustration of incidents that many would rather not acknowledge … making it even more important a subject.

Silver Bullet (1985)

Silver Bullet (1985)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2019) I’ve been rediscovering a few surprisingly good Stephen King movie adaptations lately, but Silver Bullet won’t be one of them. At best, it’s a middle-of-the-road adaptation, compensating for a familiar premise with a few quirky details, occasional good moments and a fun performance by a crowd-favourite actor. Another take on the well-worn werewolf mythos, Silver Bullet tells us about a pair of teenagers and their quirky uncle taking on a deadly threat stalking their small town. As the bodies pile up, we’re quite obviously stuck in a 1980s horror film aimed at teenagers—the blood flows, the scares can be silly, and the overall atmosphere is more comforting than any kind of horrifying. Werewolf or not, the structure of the film—with its escalating death count and final confrontation—won’t surprise anyone who’s seen any other horror movie before. Still, a few things do save Silver Bullet from all-out mediocrity. The somewhat sympathetic portrait of a teenage protagonist in a wheelchair (played by Corey Haim) may have been intended as exploitative but ends up interesting in its own way. Having Gary Busey step in as an eccentric, alcoholic uncle isn’t played for laughs as much as you’d think (even the film acknowledge that the guy has issues) but remains distinctive due to Busey himself. Finally, there is some good directing here and there, whether it’s a foggy sequence, or the clever revelation of the human identity of the werewolf—although it’s unclear whether these touches come from credited director Dan Attias or the film’s first director Don Coscarelli. In other words, expect a standard werewolf movie and you just might be mildly satisfied.

I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)

I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, June 2019) As much as I like using movies to point out the similarities between past decade and modern times, there are times when films will remind you that the past was something else entirely. It’s bad enough that I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang highlights that there was such a thing as chain gangs, or “a group of prisoners chained together to perform menial or physically challenging work as a form of punishment” as Wikipedia bloodlessly puts it. The barbaric reality on the ground was far more horrific, and this 1930s prison melodrama clearly has a provocative intention in highlighting the inhumanity of southern state’s legal systems: as with many other 1930s prison movies, this one carries the spirit of reform. The plotting is an upsetting blend of prison escape thriller and uplifting by-the-bootstrap melodrama, as our likable protagonist (another great Paul Muni performance) ends up in a chain gang, escapes, is tricked back into another one and escapes again, forever condemned to live in the underworld. Director Mervyn Leroy has a sure hand on his material, making interesting choices on how to portray elapsed time for a multi-decade story, taking us through WW1 and Depression-era America with its day labourers and relaxed moral code. The Pre-Code nature of the film feels vigorous here, being far more suggestive than later movies (what is she doing in his room … oh) and character behaviour (such as spouses cheating on each other) that would be nearly eliminated from moviemaking a few years later. Chain gangs aren’t the least of the film’s dated nature—hearing a female character bluntly state “I’m free, white and 21” had me spending a significant amount of time going down a rabbit hole of 1930s slang that really hasn’t aged well at all. Perhaps the biggest shock of the film comes at the very end, which comes abruptly and refuses us any comfort after the triumphant escape that precedes it—you can see here a very early glimmer of the moral fatalism that would later come to dominate American film noir and unsettle audiences. Despite a few misfires (such as uninteresting female characters), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang easily fulfills the expectations set by its exploitative title, and has us carefully measuring the distance between ourselves and bad ideas of the past.